What is Startup Weekend?

Startup Weekend is a global network of passionate leaders and entrepreneurs on a mission to inspire, educate, and empower individuals, teams and communities. Come share ideas, form teams, and launch startups.

At Drift Hack, we know how important it is to build and test stuff quickly. Started in 2012 on a shoestring budget by two recent UW-Madison grads, we didn’t have the luxury of a big development team or millions of investment dollars to build our first product.

What we did have, though, was drive, passion, and a dream that excited us. We knew we couldn’t afford to get stuck in “development mode” for too long, so we decided to launch our first product, Codiqa for jQuery Mobile, early, before we were comfortable with it. If it failed to catch on, we could move on to something new with little cost to us.

Like most startups around the world, we turned to Twitter Bootstrap to build the foundation for our web products. Bootstrap let us quickly lay a strong foundation for our product, and could grow with us as we expanded.

A few months ago we realized we could build a product that would dramatically reduce the time required to build websites with Bootstrap. We released Jetstrap for Bootstrap one month ago to do just that.

Jetstrap is a drag-and-drop interface builder for Twitter Bootstrap that generates clean HTML you can use to start your project. Since it uses Bootstrap, you’ll be able to keep the foundation as you grow your product. Best of all, Jetstrap was built right here in Wisconsin.

When Ben and I were asked to be mentors at Startup Weekend Milwaukee, we realized it was a perfect chance to share Jetstrap, in the hopes it would save just as much time for you as it has for us.

After all, the most important thing when launching a startup at Startup Weekend is to validate whether you are creating value for your target customer. You can’t afford to waste any time building your first proof of concept, lest you create a product no one wants.

So if you plan to build your Startup Weekend project with Twitter Bootstrap, give Jetstrap a shot. We are confident it will help you get past technical implementation details and let you focus on solving a real problem.